To Give Is to Receive--All by Mail

One result of living at the same address for years is that your junk mail increases with the length of occupancy.

Over the years, if you do business with one mail order house, and pay your bills, your name soon turns up on the customer lists of other houses, and so on.

Also, if you subscribe to one charity, your name and address are tossed around like a bean bag, and you are soon solicited by others, and so on.

Milton G. Narwitz writes that he kept a list of every solicitation he received in the year 1987, from such organizations as the Christian Appalachian Project and the Omaha Home for Boys to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the Missionaries of Africa. All told there were 53, which seems small in comparison with our annual harvest.

Narwitz takes a benign view of this onslaught: “I realize that it helps the economy by giving business to printers, paper manufacturers, the post office and all others concerned. If I were to donate what they request, I would be one of the homeless.”

Eugene Wilstach of Murietta Hot Springs writes that when he and his wife returned recently from a 19-day vacation in Europe they found 34 pounds of mail (including magazines and local papers) and 53 requests for donations.

“The highest suggested donation was $1,000--from ASPCA, UNICEF and the Simon Wiesenthal Center. The lowest was $12, from the American Indian Relief Council. If I had given the maximum amount requested for each, the total would have been $9,121.”

Wilstach obviously is known to a larger number of organizations than Narwitz, having received as many solicitations in 19 days as Narwitz received in a year.

I would say we are close to being in Wilstach’s class. I have never kept count, but I am sure not a day goes by without at least one solicitation being left in our mail box. My wife reads each, responds to many, and feels a pang of guilt every time she throws one out without sending a check.

The reason for this deluge is obvious. More and more medical research and social services are turning to private individuals for help. They do this, in ever greater numbers, because the public has responded. Americans, being generally free and prosperous, tend to be generous. In his recent “America Observed,” Alistair Cooke even found in this tendency an excuse for absolving the very rich of their greed. “Very many rich Americans, far more than the rich of any other country, do go on making great fortunes in order to give a good deal of them away to worthy causes of every kind. Europe may have its dozens of philanthropists, but America has its many thousands.”

Another kind of junk mail, however, carries no such implication of altruism. This week alone my wife has received a dozen glossy catalogues from mail order houses. They fill the mail box in clutches. They display a wealth of clothing, shoes, purses and feminine accouterments of every kind.

The reason they keep coming, and proliferating, is obvious. My wife keeps ordering, and paying her bills. I know nothing of the nature of these transactions, except that I am often summoned from my desk by the doorbell, only to find the United Parcel Service man at the door with another package.

In time her purchases will be acknowledged when she turns up wearing them. She never says, “How do you like my new outfit? It’s mail order.” She assumes that nine times out of 10 I won’t notice. As a result of this clandestine commerce, she has more clothes in her wardrobe closet than, as a Bakersfield high school girl, she could ever have dreamed of.

Some of the catalogues offer men’s clothing. She invites me to look at them, but I never order anything. Possibly to appease her own sense of guilt, she occasionally orders something for me. As a consequence, I now have a maroon coat, a light green coat, a pink beige coat, and a coat with a tiny black and khaki check, none of which can be worn at anything but a tea.

There is some correlation between the mail order catalogues and the charity solicitations. I suspect that her indulgence in the one prompts her response to the other.